in the soil
I’m sure I thought when I was little of the weather as something home-brewed, a product of the hills and fields of the country and of the sky above it, but now it seems as if the weather is something we are subjected to, this grey little island buffeted this way and that by cold winds from the north or east, warmer ones from the south; strange we don’t have our familiar names for them as they do in France or Italy, where if you say that the mistral or the scirocco is blowing everybody immediately knows what you are talking about. Certainly in Sicily people are as resigned to being subject to the weather as they are to the forces of history; such anyway is the cliché of the Sicilian shrug. Here everyone complains about the spring as if it were not always fickle, myself included, while the warm days come as they will.
in the kitchen
The mushroom guy at work brings us bags of morels which thanks to whatever combination of weather they are receiving in wherever he gets them from are growing exceptionally well, large and free of blemish and deliciously, intensely fungal as well as profoundly alien, one of those things you have to wonder who first thought it sensible to eat one. I suppose our ancestors were more used to eating grit and small insects in their food, which even four washes in salted water do not entirely remove. A different mushroom guy at a different workplace would say when offering us particularly wormy porcini that if you made them into risotto then nobody would notice; proximity to the sources of ingredients gives you different standards of edibility, I think.
on the page
I re-read Rebecca Tamás’ collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman which I first read when it came out and when I was just beginning to try growing things and working in the soil, a profound and enlightening book. I don’t have much to say about it except that it is radical but somehow calm and full of an intense kindness and leads you – or led me, anyway – down a thousand avenues of thought and further reading.
Funny, I read this sitting in the Bar Central in a small village in the south of France. There's been high winds for days now. The waiter comes over and I comment on the wind to which he replies, yes le mistral can drive you crazy. It's a saying I guess. I had never heard of the mistral before, except in these two instances, just a few minutes apart
Good news about morels this year - they seem to like the proximity of sheep, ground orchids and chalky soil. Sussex Downs? Just thinking aloud.